We show that many stylized empirical patterns for mutual fund flows are driven by investor sentiment. Specifically, when sentiment is high, investors exhibit a stronger tendency of chasing past fund performance; fund flows are less sensitive to fund expenses; and investors are attracted more to...

We argue that active fund managers can pick stocks only when the market presents such opportunities. We propose measures of stock selection opportunity and show evidence that a significant portion of mutual funds time stock selection, i.e., trading more when stock selection opportunities are...

The literature proposes two competing explanations — the “smart-money” and “persistent-flow” hypotheses — for the positive relation between mutual fund flow and future fund performance. We examine the flow-performance relation for different classes of U.S. domestic equity mutual...

Existing literature documents a “smart money” effect in that investors have selection ability of mutual funds. Nevertheless, there remains a debate on whether such effect is simply the result of stock return momentum. Using monthly fund flows during the period of 1993 to 2010, we show that...

Holding earnings surprise constant, investors react negatively to late earnings announcements. One standard deviation of announcement delay (about 5 days) corresponds to 23 bps lower abnormal returns over a two-day announcement window. We show that the results are robust to further controlling...

We examine the role of institutional investors underlying post-earnings-announcement drift (PEAD). Our results show that while institutional investors generally herd on earnings news, such correlated trading among institutions does not eliminate or reduce market underreaction to earnings...